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That doesn't sound like procrastination to me as much as it sounds like a ritual. I say that because the steps, even though completely unrelated to what you want to accomplish, are still moving you closer to accomplishing your goals.

For those of us whose procrastination has had a negative impact, those steps invariably drive us further from what we want to accomplish.

IMO, that's not procrastination. That's just guilt-free play. The key is that you are still getting things done that you need/want to do. You're just aware of when you need a break and are comfortable letting yourself do so. That's not the procrastination that the OP is talking about...

You have a very valid point, and even though I call it procrastinating it's not the same. However, I am all too familiar with the procrastinating of the type described by the OP, as I have experienced it myself quite severely.

I suppose the reason I made my comment is one day I realized that it was actually a positive thing to "procrastinate" for a non-trivial amount of time before I even start working; as long as I actually do start before it gets out of control.

I suppose it was also helpful for me to get rid of the psychological baggage of feeling guilty about "procrastinating", and I wanted to give a word of caution about not over-compensating by going to an extreme of never taking a break, or taking too short of a break, because of feeling guilty or afraid of not being able to start working again if you do.

I do this and call it "constructive procrastination". I quite often wash the dishes because I'm putting off writing some code, for example.

In your specific case I think it's even healthier. I can't work well or think straight if my environment is cluttered, it feels like it's cluttering my head as well. Identifying things in your environment that affect your performance and taking control over them is KEY to productivity and happiness.

Thats awesome. I'm reading the Now Habit at the moment (mentioned by the OP) and that seems to be one of the main points. "Guilt-free play" is about doing the things you WANT to do when you want to do them, so you can focus on important stuff later. Guilt is a huge part...

I'm not sure you have experienced the kind of procrastination the op speaks about.

You have a to-do list of 5 items for today and then a week later(with up to 11 hours of busy-work everyday), you're on item number 3.

This kind of procrastination is a sickness and has causes a lot of emotional distress.

You're reading hacker news(or even working on a less important project) full of guilt and indescribable negative feelings that you need to be working on the "important things", then you move to the important thing you need to be doing but you cant get it done cause there is this hyper-active force on the inside of you that just wont allow you to focus.

Its a very sad-depressing place I hope never to return to.

I have bouts of getting out of this cycle, but always seem to return, how did you get out?

When i got into this cycle i was in a desperate place.

I got out of my first startup because "Chinese importers" had driven prices down so much that I couldn't turn a decent profit.

A few weeks later, i got in touch with my manufacturer about a new product for the iPhone 5 and as they were in the process of manufacturing my new product, i listed it on amazon for pre-orders.

I was selling about 10 pieces an hour and had a few thousand pounds in my account after about 5-days, enough to cover my manufacturing costs.

Then amazon reached out that my account had been blocked because it was somehow related to another account they have previously blocked and i cant continue to sell with them or open another account.

They froze my funds and cancelled my account, so i had to refund all those pre-orders and at the time amazon was 99.9 percent of my sales(big mistake)

After that disappointment, i was a bit depressed and decided to leave that business and come into web startups.

I started learning how to code and while i do enjoy coding, its not something i really want to do as much as something i felt (at least at that time) that i had to do. I think it was this mental block + the mild(not clinical)depression that caused me to continue to procrastinate this way.

I was like this for i think about 6 months.. it was bad.

Along with a complete lifestyle optimization (i went in hard on reorganizing my life to be efficient), the big change came when i started working on another promising project - i now had something to look forward to and a hope to hold on-to and i think that's what really made the difference and got me "productive" again.

I can send you details about my lifestyle optimization if you are interested.

I think that you make a very important point about discontinuity. It made me think about how I could reduce the inertia of refamiliarization when I resume editing some program after some interruption. I find that I can concentrate for about four hours before my ability to maintain a mental model of the salient aspects of whatever subsystem I am modifying break down and I start to make unconscious mistakes that I fail to notice due to the effort required to direct my little remaining drip of concentration on those aspects that were associated with the initial goal. I suppose one could estimate how much time it would take to make a given change and only attempt it if you knew that you had an ample block of time to complete it without pause, but I somehow feel that this is wishful thinking and that you don't necessarily know what you are getting yourself into when you resume editing some part of a complex system.

Those prone to procrastination will find that the advice to "do a little every day" isn't all that helpful if the task requires the previous day's (partially unfinished) changes to be comprehended before you can pick up where you left off, mental model now reconstructed. There is also a temptation to rewrite this unfinised, untested, undebugged code as unentangled, "fresh", code is easier to write than that which is burdened with interdependencies, observed protocols, ceremony and context-dependent assumptions. Without refamiliarization there is a danger of blundering blindly into damaging changes with subtle, far reaching repurcussions, due to your naive comprehension of the system dynamic.

Given that refamiliarization is exhausting, I wondered if there were remedies that could reduce the time and effort it required each day:

    * Allow the visualisation of the project with a number of domain specific Projectional Editors - derived from an Abstract Syntax Tree
    * Use SSA symbolic variables - imperative programs are hard to understand because they support the reassignment of named data cells
    * If you have to have state defer changes to a globally synchronised Superstep - also support the Command/Query Separation Principle
    * Use a live programming debugger to play with the system and refamiliarise yourself with its dynamical behaviour in a safe sandbox
    * It may help to use a language that scores well on the Halstead complexity measure to reduce overall development effort - Python
    * Use a WHY directed outline for code - that explains its goals through a folding text editor that supports literate programming
    * Avoid fragile base classes - there is very little point having encapsulation if you hack the heritage of an object's genealogy
    * Use Go style interfaces

If all that fails:

    * Revert to the previous working version and redo up to the point of interruption or pause - as it's easier to write entangled stuff

I welcome anyone's opinions on these suggestions, or suggestions of their own...

I also welcome anyone's anonymous cowardly downvotes

;-)